


Stages of Recovery

by Winterstar



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Depression, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, References to Suicide, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-11
Updated: 2013-04-11
Packaged: 2017-12-08 05:20:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/757511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winterstar/pseuds/Winterstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve must go through the stage of grief before he can recover. But there is someone there to help him in the end.</p>
<p>
  <i>Steve looks away from him. He looks everywhere else. “There’s no place for me.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“I know,” Tony replies and it isn’t a repeat of what he’s said before but actually more of a prayer. It hurts and breaks open the outer shell. </i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stages of Recovery

**Author's Note:**

> This has not been beta read. It is only a one shot. Please note the tags for depression and grief and suicide ideation.

1\. Denial  
Every now and again, Steve stops himself from reaching out and touching people. When he first woke up from the ice, he ran and ran until he couldn’t stand the sound, until he realized he was running further into the nightmare and not away from it. He listened to the briefings and followed his handler around, and was polite and considerate. He still wanted to touch people to see if they were all just phantoms or something equally bizarre.

Everyone is polite to him. In some sorts of ways, he hates it. He finds it kind of crazy and nuts that he wants someone to take a swing at him, say something offensive. Most people just don’t, they don’t talk in open conversation with him. They have no idea what to say to him or how to even approach him. He spends most of his days roaming the hallways of SHIELD headquarters and nodding to people, trying as his handler tells him to do, to make a connection.

Yet, everyone around him looks and acts like an alien from those comic books he used to read when he was a child. He’s not entirely sure he believes anything they say or do or show him. He sits and reads the ‘tablets’ they give him. They install him in a small apartment in Brooklyn, thinking the familiar surroundings will be good for his reintegration into modern society. They forget that showing him exactly what he’s lost might just do the opposite. 

He doesn’t confess this to anyone, least of all his handler.

He sits and looks at files of his friends, long gone and dead. He even goes over to the old church grave yard and finds the simple stone marker for his mother. He kneels down and picks off the weeds from the stone, the years have weathered the letters. Her first name is lost to oblivion. He hasn’t really cried since his mother’s death, and he doesn’t cry now. He just looks at the gray stone, reaches out and touches it, feels the heat from the sun reflected back to him, and pretends, just for a moment, that it is that cold March day when she actually died.

He remembers how scared she had been that he would catch tuberculosis from her, that he would succumb at an early age. He looks at the stone and realizes she was only in her early forties when she died, so painfully young. 

They tell him he’s in his nineties but really he’s in his twenties. He’s not sure what to make of it and decides at some points that it is all a fabrication of theirs. They are playing with his mind, he is a prisoner of war and Schmidt or Hitler or someone equally horrible is dosing him with something that induces elaborate dreams. It is ridiculous to think this, but he has to. He cannot accept it, so he has to deny it.

His handler smiles and says it is expected. Grief is like that, he is undergoing the five stages of grief. This is a new and silly concept he thinks, like people follow a path toward some sort of acceptance of their life’s circumstances. Modern people have to categorize everything and everyone. There’s a term for that, or a cure for this, or a stage or phrase or some such nonsense.

He calls it life and deals with it.

2\. Anger  
Right into anger. It doesn’t take long for him to pass through the denial stage into anger and it is at the perfect point in time when anger hits. He’s on the Helicarrier and the idiot son of Howard is challenging him, telling him there’s nothing special about him except for what came out of a bottle. It rings in his head until he wants to throttle the flamboyant cuss. 

Saying words like that, denying what Erskine made him promise cuts right to the core and rips the heart out of everything that Steve needs to believe in. He thinks if Stark put on the suit at that moment, nothing would have stopped Steve from tearing the arc reactor out of his chest and crushing it in his bare fist. He’s that angry, he’s that segmented from everything and everyone.

The attack occurs and he turns toward it like a flower to the sun. He bathes in it. He loses himself in it until he’s a machine, moving through with grace and speed. He fights with a single purpose; everyone thinks it is to save his city, to save his country. In reality, it is something else. In actuality, it is to burn away the anger of what has been done to him. 

He shreds what he can, and keeps getting up regardless of who tells him to stay down, regardless of the moments of sorrow and pain and loss that fill him and empty him at the same time. He’s falling into a pit but he fires everything and blasts way through with only his shield, his fist, and a few good men and one excellent woman on his side. 

This works for him because he doesn’t want to think. All he wants to do is fight. That’s what he’s good for, he’s a soldier, made into a soldier by a magic formula and some rays until it hurt like hell and ripped him limb from limb. He lets the memories of those moments, of his friends, of Bucky and Peggy come over him and he smashes every alien down until their blood soaks into his own wounds and congeals on his skin, until there is nothing but the rage firing through his vessels and holding up his bones. 

He understands Doctor Banner. He doesn’t understand any of the rest of them, least of all Stark. 

He’s read all the reports; he knows what is expected and what has occurred in the past. He tries not to recall Howard when he thinks about Stark, but it is hard and painful and causes his breath to hitch in his throat. Looking at Stark, seeing how he moves and walks and thrills at discovery and science just hurts and it boils the anger to the surface. So he leaves Stark alone and says nothing to him during their after victory dinner outing. He eats, and wanders away eventually.

He peels off his uniform in the dark of his apartment, washes away the blood, and picks out the shrapnel. There are little pieces of his uniform stuck in the wound on his side. It takes him over an hour to pick each and every one out. His eyes tear from the pain. He used to have someone do this for him in the war, back in the day when he had a team. Now he has the Avengers and who is he to them? Just an old man, out of time, and out of date. 

He uses the tweezers to pull out the threads of his uniform, the Kevlar fragments, hissing as he does. When he’s done he’s physically shaking and has to balance himself against the side of the shower stall to ensure he doesn’t collapse on the wet tile floor. When he thinks of all he has lost, all the companionship, his friends, he bashes his hand through the glass door of the shower.

It takes him another hour to clean out the glass from the cuts on his hand.

3\. Bargaining  
When did gods become regular people? Steve does not understand the concept of Thor and his brother, Loki. He can accept that they are some kind of extraterrestrial beings but he does not go as far as acknowledging their god status. To him, there is only one God and if that means he is old fashioned so be it.

No one calls him on this one, and for that he’s grateful. Not even Stark. Stark likes to call Thor, a god or demi-god as if it gives him extra status or something. Steve has to admit, he likes Thor. Thor is an easy person (god?) to get along with. He’s both innocent of Earth’s ways, which makes for common ground between the two of them, and he’s experienced in war and battles, which again makes for common ground between the two of them.

He likes Thor, and it is exactly why he doesn’t go to Thor to ask his question. He doesn’t want Thor to have to disappoint him. Instead, he asks Agent Maria Hill for a special private interview with Thor’s brother, Loki. Agent Hill looks at him with her wide eyes and a skeptical frown as if she assessing whether or not he’s going to go off his rocker and kill the maniac that let loose a massive alien invasive on the heart of New York. 

He has to admit the thought crossed his mind, but he’s smarter than that and tells her so. “I understand what an international incident is, Agent Hill. I can extrapolate what an interstellar incident might cause.” He’s proud he’s strung together all of those words without tripping over them because he’d never thought he’d have to consider alien politics. 

She acquiesces, but he thinks it is only because he asks if she would like to discuss tactical strategies involving the Helicarrier and matrix array landing. She’s pleased and allows him entrance into Loki’s small cell.

Loki has a device of some sort over his mouth. Steve thinks it might be something Thor may have provided. It allows Loki to drink and eat, and have the barest ability to actually communicate. He’s sitting on a chair in the far corner of the cell and there are cameras as well as trained guns on him.

He isn’t afraid of Loki, more confused and anxious. “You’re a god.”

Loki only raises an eyebrow and gives off an air of superiority even in his chained and muted state.

“I would like to offer you something,” Steve says and notes the cameras at the corners of the room. They will pick up everything. He is not stupid to think they will not record everything he says. 

Loki tilts his head as if in question.

“The tesseract is a door way to other places, possibly other times as I understand it.”

Loki waggles his head back and forth as if to tell Steve he only has a rudimentary understanding of something much greater than him. Steve accepts this, he isn’t a scientist, and that is fine. 

“Can it be used to transport someone to another time?”

Loki sighs and swallows once. “Not entirely.”

The device on his mouth mutes the rest. Steve cannot possibly guess what Loki meant to say – it is just a muttering of sounds, a jumble of broken words. 

“As a god you know how to use it?”

Loki nods.

“Could you transport anyone?”

Loki nods again.

“I could put in a good word for you. I could talk to Thor. I understand he wants to mend his relationship with you. I understand how it feels to lose someone close to you,” Steve says. He hates asking this of Loki. He doesn’t even think he has the kind of pull he’s inferring. 

“What?” Loki asks.

“Could it put me back where I belong?” Steve asks. He knows he has about thirty seconds before Maria Hill and her agents are down here, wrestling him out of the cell. They’ve heard every word. They’ll have him in some therapy session minutes after that. They will probably put him on suicide watch.

“And where do you belong?” Loki asks before the mask cuts him off again.

The response startles Steve, because those ice blue eyes bore into him with frigid clarity. Where does he belong? Before he can answer, Hill and her agents arrive.

4\. Depression  
They put him on suicide watch for the next forty eight hours. After which he convinces them he was only curious and, gee can’t a guy wonder about these things. He uses his most innocent, golly gee type of façade and they fall for it. For some reason, they think just because he comes from the age of their grandfathers’ he’s a moron when it comes to understanding how to manipulate people. Sure, he isn’t any good with the dames, but he does have some smarts.

He gets out on time to see Thor and Loki off. He shakes hands with Stark and smiles at him. He wishes he could say something more to him, as if just a moment alone with him might clear some of the muck between them. Instead, he settles for a see ya later and hops on the cycle and leaves. 

Everyone assumes he is going on a sightseeing tour of the great American states. He is not. He stores the bike and ends up back at his apartment. He doesn’t see or talk to anyone he knows for three weeks. When he stubs his toe while walking through his beige apartment, and he voices an _ouch_ the sound of his own voice shocks him.

He spends the first few days re-acclimating to his home. He occupies the rest of the time trying to forget who he is. He listens to the radio, he scans through the internet. He even buys a television and watches it for three days straight. 

There’s no anchor here. There is nothing to tether him down to the ground. He realizes everyone at SHIELD walked on egg shells around him because they thought he might explode or shatter one or the other. He thinks this time he might just fade away.

He considers whether or not he should call SHIELD, a therapist, or reach out to someone – perhaps Natasha. He does not. He calls Peggy.

She does not remember him.

She has dementia.

He cries for three hours after he hangs up the phone.

He’s spent and exhausted and hungry when he finishes but he doesn’t get up off the bed. He stares at the ceiling and wonders. Wonders who put him in that fake hospital room. Wonders why they put him in boots. Wonders if they even thought more than two minutes beyond him waking because surely, he would have peered out the window and seen the set design and fake New York skyline. 

The thoughts swirl like curdled milk in his head until he’s nauseous with them. He doesn’t get sick, he never does. Not anymore. He’s forced to concede he needs help. He’ll get some soon he promises, but then his gaze falls on the beautiful photo of Peggy again from the file and his heart bleeds a little more and he wants nothing to do with anyone else.

5\. Acceptance  
A knock on his door after the fourth week in self-imposed isolation brings Steve out of his reverie and he shuffles to it to swing it open.

Stark.

His hair is sticking up like he forgot to wrangle it into submission this morning and his eyes are a little bit crazed. He has a smirk on his face and an eyebrow raised when he sees Steve with his pajama bottoms still on and hair equally unkempt. 

It is fourteen hundred hours. 

He doesn’t invite Stark in, but leaves the door hanging open. He goes to the kitchen and opens the icebox, pulls out a pint of ice cream, grabs a spoon from the counter, and digs in.

“Wow, you got this modern living thing down,” Stark says as Steve tosses himself onto the couch. There are empty cartons of take out thrown around the room.

“What do you want, Stark?”

“Put enough of that away, say good bye to six pack abs,” Tony says and points to the ice cream. 

“I work out three times a day.”

“You do?”

“There’s a gym down the street.”

“And you go there?”

“Yes, even now, I still go there. I’m sure SHIELD knows it, too.” He isn’t lying. He needs to work out, it is like a religion to him, now. What else is he supposed to do with his time? He repeats, “What do you want?”

“What else do you do other than work out?” Stark says. He doesn’t sit down; he just leans against the kitchen island, bar thing. “Obviously, that military training on cleanliness didn’t take and you’ve forgotten about personal hygiene.”

“I just got out of bed, Stark.”

“At two in the afternoon?”

Steve turns and looks away. He doesn’t need to say anything at all. He should just throw him out. He doesn’t. “I sleep when I can. Sometimes not at all.”

Silence drops over them and he’s a half of a second away from telling Stark to leave when he says, “I know what you mean.”

Steve looks up at him. The façade has dropped, the mask is gone, and he sees Tony Stark for the first time. He doesn’t see Howard at all. He doesn’t see the playboy or genius or anything else. He sees a man with vulnerabilities, who is here when no one else is. 

“I can’t sleep,” Steve whispers. It is the first time he’s actively saying he cannot sleep instead of just throwing out casual remarks about not needing anymore sleep. 

“I know.” Tony – he’s Tony now – stands up and crosses the distance between them.

Steve looks away from him. He looks everywhere else. “There’s no place for me.”

“I know,” Tony replies and it isn’t a repeat of what he’s said before but actually more of a prayer. It hurts and breaks open the outer shell. 

Steve’s blinking too much, he wants to escape but he stays still.

“I came back from Afghanistan and my world had changed, too. Not like yours, but it changed and it didn’t fit anymore. I couldn’t make it fit. I had to change it so I could live in it, again.” Tony says as he sinks down onto the couch next to Steve.

“I can’t change it, it’s all different, and I’m stuck here, forever.”

“Yes. But you can make it yours. You can change the world. You. Steve Rogers. You. Captain America, you can change the world.”

“I don-.”

“Oh, if we ever needed you, we need you now, Captain. We need you, now.” 

Steve does not reply. The words hit deep inside him, in what he hasn’t touched the whole time he’s been awake. It is a little flash of possibility, of hope that maybe he’s supposed to be here. Yes, he’s lost everything, but maybe he has the world to gain in its place. There is so much to gain, here and now.

After a moment, Tony says, “Get dressed, Cap.” He stands and gestures for Steve to follow.

“What? Why?” He’s not ready to go out there, face the world, be someone again.

“Because, you’re coming home.”

“Home?”

“Yes, home.”

Steve nods and follows. Maybe this isn’t what he expected, maybe it isn’t what he wished for, but maybe it holds some promise. Maybe, just maybe he can accept that for now. Maybe he’s found a way to recover what he’s lost.

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I needed a break from writing my cap_ironman reverse big bang. Hope you liked it. Now off to finish that so I can get back to my series. Follow me on [tumblr](http://www.tumblr.com/blog/winterstar95) for updates on my writing.


End file.
